Blog Archives
Volume 10 | Number 5 | Issue 46 | December 2000 Marion McLeod: Charlotte Randall, The Curative Editorial Correspondence Rosemary McLeod: Helen Smyth, Rocking the Cradle: Contraception, Sex and Politics in New Zealand Joan Rosier-Jones: Barbara Else (ed), Grand…
The High Jump: A New Zealand Childhood Elizabeth Knox Victoria University Press, $24.95, ISBN 0864733372 Anyone who grew up in New Zealand in the 1960s and ’70s can bask in the nostalgia of Elizabeth Knox’s trilogy The High Jump…
Mene Confessions: Tall Tales from Netball’s Inner Circle Bernice Mene (and Geoff Young) Hodder Moa Beckett, $24.95, ISBN 1869588282 Picture the scene: an exceptionally glum group of public servants in Wellington one Monday morning in October 1999. The reason…
laminations Murray Edmond Auckland University Press, $19.95, ISBN 1869402227 In the poem “Can that Mango” from Murray Edmond’s latest book, the following lines are spoken (or so a note informs us) by one of two angels who are discussing a…
Japan and New Zealand, 150 Years ed Roger Peren New Zealand Centre for Japanese Studies, Massey University, in association with the Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, [not for sale], ISBN 0958350574 In 1878, Asajiro Noda, the eight-year-old son…
Burnt Barley Peta Mathias Vintage, $29.95, ISBN 1869414276 Irish at Heart Marie Gray HarperCollins, $24.95, ISBN 1865903449 It’s bound to continue to be one of the curiosities of this century – as it was of the last – that however…
Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady: such an adolescent cliché, you could say, not to mention a literary one. Spirited young thing falls in thrall to a superficially sophisticated older man, and ruins her life. The Victorians were apparently…
Julia Moore : Julia Moore P.I. Penguin, $24.95, ISBN 0140293833 Lauren Roche: Bent Not Broken Steele Roberts, $24.95, ISBN 1877228338 These are the stories of two New Zealand women who have triumphed over circumstance. Neither story makes cheerful reading…
Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems 1960-1975 eds Alan Brunton, Murray Edmond, Michele Leggott Auckland University Press, $49.95, ISBN 869402308 A thick black-and-white book with a beautiful cover illustration by Patrick Hanly taken from the second issue of Freed, Big Smoke…
The Crickets We came creeping out the cracks hot summer nights at the local swimming pool like black, anti-cicadas of the night, our exotic chirps a skimpy advert for the sins we hoped would be forthcoming. We sucked in…